Throughout this application, various publications are referenced by Arabic numerals within parentheses. Full citations for these publications may be found at the end of the specification immediately preceding the claims. The disclosures of these publications in their entireties are hereby incorporated by reference into this application in order to more fully describe the state of the art as known to those skilled therein as of the date of the invention described and claimed herein.
Paraneoplastic neurologic syndromes are disorders in which patients with malignancy develop neurologic dysfunction which is not a result of a tumor mass or metastasis (1,2). It has been suggested that these tumors express neuronal antigens, which elicit an immune response which are appropriate to the tumor, but destructive to the nervous system (3). One such syndrome which has been recently characterized is paraneoplastic opsoclonus (PO), in which brainstem dysfunction develops in patients with underlying malignancies resulting in a characteristic disorder of eye movement. In adults, the most common associated malignancies are breast cancer (4) or lung cancer (5).